29 A Venture concept 2

This idea came to me as a senior student that needs to secure an internship in order to graduate. Although this is very common it can be difficult to attain one that is meaningful. It is also uncommon to get paid for these internships. As a Sport Management major my opportunities for internships fluctuate depending on the semester because different sport seasons are taking place. It became apparent to me that this was going to be a stressful process and I wanted to find out if others were in the same situation.

Opportunity: Through many interviews and seeing many friends go through the same issue I realized this was an opportunity throughout the college community. I found many senior who are in a scholastic program that requires the student to independently find an internship, and I have also found students who have limited choices of internships. Since internships can help springboard someone into their career path it is important that they have choices and opportunities that will push them in that direction. The market for this opportunity is incredibly large and replenishes itself every year. Since most students are doing this independently of the university there is no loyalties in which we would have to compete. I also have encountered another opportunity in using this same concept to help high school students. When in high school students are expected to perform a certain number of community service hours. Also students are wanting to decide on a major for their college education but often never get to experience it. I believe this market can be very large as well.

Innovation: The way this service is designed to work is to create partnerships between the universities and outside businesses to plug in feeder programs to these businesses. These internships that are supported by the partnerships will have and application process much like scholarships do. The idea is that these partnerships will create a more effective and efficient way to get students the experience they need while also thrusting them into the workforce. Unlike most products and services, this is no created to be monetized. We are not selling this service but rather finding a way to benefit all parties.

Venture Concept: This service will help eliminate some of the stress of finding and internship for college students. Since we are a new concept we will only need to help students realize that we are more efficient than them doing this own their own. We do not have to get them to switch from something else. Although we do not have a product to package we will need to educate students on our system. In teaching the students about how our partnerships are beneficial to them they will want to use our service. The high school service will be very similar but rather than being paid they will earn service hours while also being able to test out field in which they may wish to study. 

The secret sauce of this venture is that I want this to benefit the students. We will be hard to copy because I don’t want this to become a service that causes students to reach deeper in their pockets to finish school but rather use the partnerships between university and business to benefit everybody.

The next step for this service is to expand into high schools in a similar concept but yet still different. What I mean by that is that many students in high school are unsure of their future major, and with this our program will help them narrow it down and gain experience. Rather than getting paid they will receive community service hours while gaining the experience which will also help with when applying for colleges.

For myself I honestly don’t know if I see myself as an entrepreneur. I would love to get this program off the ground so it can help students all over the country. After that I hope to work for either a baseball or football team. I one day would love to be a coach or GM.

Unfortunately I didn’t receive any feedback on my first venture concept assignment but I have received great feedback throughout the semester. For the most part it has been positive with ideas of how I can make this a successful idea. At first I received negative feedback on the idea of having this program in high schools as well so I eliminated it. Once I realized it would be better to make it more of an experimental thing in which the students receive community service hours I feel it works much better. This was the major adaptation I made to this idea.